Wikipedia:Kannada Support, Enabling Kannada on your desktop.

Enabling Kannada on your desktop. Here’s a comprehensive document to help you through enabling Kannada on your desktop on your favourite Operating System. Browse through the index and read the section relevant to your Operating System.

Note: Feel free to volunteer and correct broken links or any erroneous information if present, in this document – with proper reason stated for the correction on the talk page if the correction is non-trivial.

Who should read this?

If you are unable to view or edit the Kannada text on this Wikipedia, this page is for you. This page is also recommended for users who can view or edit but are not familiar with editing documents in Kannada using Unicode. Despite the title of the document, the instructions will apply to all sites and content which use Unicode.

If you have further questions or distribution specific issues for which the solutions are not listed below, you can post onto the discussion forums at [1]. But please make sure you read this document properly before submitting support requests there.

Preparing your system for Kannada

While most new versions of WindowsOperating Systems and Linux Distributions have basic support for viewing and editing Kannada in Unicode, they still have some quirks or need some configuration to get it working.

Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows 98

Although officially there is no support for the above Operating Systems, some users have reported that using IE6 upgrades Kannada Support for the Browser. Visit this page or make enquiries on the mailing lists/boards listed below

The following is some additional information from the Unicode site regarding Windows 2000:

For Windows 2000, getting additional languages installed is as follows:

Start > Settings > Control Panel > Regional Options.

In the General tab, set all the languages you may want to display, the more you set, the more you will be able to process multilingual data through all your applications, including your browser. This adds fonts as well as system support for these languages.

Full fonts with Office 2000

If you have Microsoft Office 2000 and newer versions, you can get the Arial Unicode MS font, which is the most complete. To get it, insert the Office CD, and do a custom install. Choose Add or Remove Features. Click the (+) next to Office Tools, then International Support, then the Universal Font icon, and choose the installation option you want.

Microsoft’s Keyboard Layouts (Deprecated)

NOTE: Apparently, the Indic IME’s are supposed to work only on Microsoft Word and doesn’t work well on other applications. Hence, the instructions for Phonetic IME here won’t be useful unless you are using this input with MS Office. The Inscript keymap however will work out of the box without downloading anything. Use the other two solutions listed below for phonetic keymaps.

Distribution specific

Mandrakelinux

Of all distributions, Mandrakelinux has the best support for Kannada out of the box. It includes Sampige font, Kannada locale, Inscript layout and KDE with Kannada Support. If you are using Mandrakelinux, most of these steps are optional.

Note: To install the Kannada package if you have not done during installation, do the following steps, as root:

You will need to restart an application after installing the font to see the newly installed font in that application.

Note:

Using Sampige font (that comes by default as of now with some of the Linux distributions) might not render Kannada properly. It is recommended that the users install either Kedage Font from brahmi project or Mallige from the same place (and remove all other Kannada Unicode fonts).

The package called ttf-free-fonts, if installed renders Kannada incorrectly on few distributions. Remove the ttf-free-fonts and restart Mozilla.

You can also install fonts from the repositories on few distributions (like Debian, Ubuntu) – by installing ttf-kannada-fonts via apt-get.

sudo apt-get install ttf-kannada-fonts

The package installs either Sampige font or Kedage font depending on the version of the package you’ve installed (the latest versions have Kedage and Mallige in it).

m17n

m17n library is an opensource initiative for realizing multilingualization in Linux/Unix Platforms. The library serves as a backend for the Smart Common Input Method (SCIM) Project. SCIM provides a neat way of switching between Kannada and English keys.

Hence, to achieve full Kannada editing capabilities on your linux system this way, you should have both the m17n backend and the SCIM frontend.

Alternatively, Fedora Users can install source rpms from here
Install both the libraries and databases.
1. Go to the library source directory in the terminal and logged in as root
2. Type './configure' and then 'make' and 'make install'
3. Do the same for the database.

Alternatively, Fedora users can download it from here
Install the m17n-SCIM in a similar fashion.
Some users have encountered trouble in finding the already installed SCIM package when they use './configure'.
To correct this problem, please follow these guidlines.
1. To make sure that you have scim, in the terminal, try whereis scim.
you should get something similar to 'scim: /usr/bin/scim.....'
2. In the terminal, try whereis pkgconfig. You should have 2-3 results. Go to the directory each of these
directories and see if 'scim.pc' is present. If so, include the path of that directory in the environment
variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH (ex: export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig )
Once pkgconfig is able to find scim, installation should proceed smoothly.

4. After installation, in Fedora 3 you should see the SCIM Input Method Setup in Applications–>Preferences–>More Preferences

Alternatively, you can invoke scim-setup by typing scim-setup in the terminal.

5. Once the SCIM fron end starts,

Go to the IME-engine-->Global Setup option to see the Kannada keyboard listed.
Go to Kannada, expand the tree and you see the m17n kan-itrans option and click edit hot-keys.
Choose a convineint hotkey for changing the keyboard to Kannada.
Go to Front end --> Global Hotkeys. Choose another hotkey to invoke this setup utility.
Go to Panel--> GTK and select all options you want to make the SCIM utility easily accesible.

Now you are all set to type in Kannada!!!. Go to any UTF-8 enabled editor or IM (gedit, gaim work!) and select the m17n kan itrans Keyboard in Kannada in the SCIM utility (which should be running on the desktop panel) and start typing Kannada! If you any further doubts and questions, please visit http://kannada.sourceforge.net/support and post your queries.

IIIMF

IIIMF is an multi-platform input method framework. IIMF comes with Nudi and Inscript layouts for Kannada. But be warned, it is very unstable. The IIIMF howto at Indlinux provides more information and step by step instructions on installation and usage.

ISIS

ISIS is an easy-to-use system for computation using Indian scripts, developed by Gautam Sengupta of the Center for Applied Linguistics & Translation Studies, University of Hyderabad. ISIS binaries can be downloaded from here.

Inscript Layout

Mandrakelinux (keyboarddrake)

On Mandrakelinux the preferred way to enable the inscript layout keyboard is trough the Mandrakelinux control center -> keyboard, choose the Kannada keyboard, and the key combination to switch between US and Kannada layouts; that will work for all desktop and WM.

Browsing

Konqueror

The version of Konqueror that comes with KDE 3.2 or above or if you are using Konqueror with QT 3.2 or above, you will get Kannada Display and Input in Unicode, provided you have followed the above steps.

Mozilla

By default, Mozilla products on Fedora Core 3 & Ubuntu come with indic language support. All you need to do is put the following statements in your Mozilla/FireFox/Thunderbird executable (Ex: in /usr/bin/firefox ) under #Variables or your ~/.bashrc file.

Mac OS X

Free: Wikipedia user Nicholas Shanks has modified the Kedage font to run on Mac OS X, and created an INSCRIPT‐based keyboard layout. Visit his website’s project page to download them.

Commercial: A company called XenoType Technologies has been selling a Kannada language kit for several years. It includes one font, with more in development, and comes with two keyboard layouts, one QWERTY‐like and one based on INSCRIPT.

E-MAIL CAMPAIGN TO IMPLEMENT MAHISHI REPORThttp://www.starofmysore.com/main.asp?type=news&item=7340Mysore , Sept. 17 (KCU)- An e-mail signature campaign from Kannadigas all over the world has been launched by V. M. Kumaraswamy, founder of e-Kavi, a forum of Kannada lovers from all over the world, to urge the Government to implement the Dr. Sarojini Mahishi Report.